(IVÁN): BUSCANDO A DIOS

life, while believing in God.

496. Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and
goodness.

497. Against those who, trusting to the mercy of God, live heedlessly,
without doing good works.--As the two sources of our sins are pride and
sloth, God has revealed to us two of His attributes to cure them, mercy and
justice. The property of justice is to humble pride, however holy may be our
works, et non intres injudicium, etc.; and the property of mercy is to
combat sloth by exhorting to good works, according to that passage: "The
goodness of God leadeth to repentance, and that other of the Ninevites: "Let
us do penance to see if peradventure He will pity us." And thus mercy is so
far from authorising slackness that it is on the contrary the quality which
formally attacks it; so that instead of saying, "If there were no mercy in
God we should have to make every kind of effort after virtue," we must say,
on the contrary, that it is because there is mercy in God that we must make
every kind of effort.

498. It is true there is difficulty in entering into godliness. But this
difficulty does not arise from the religion which begins in us, but from the
irreligion which is s